Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Sixteen years before, people had been just as anxious for me to see Mr. Wahid, but then it was for another reason.

  In 1979 Mr. Wahid and his pesantren, the Islamic boarding-school movement, had been thought to be at the forefront of the modern Muslim movement. The pesantren had the additional glory at that time of having been visited by the educationist Ivan Illich and pronounced good examples of the “deschooling” he favored. Deschooling wasn’t perhaps the best idea to offer village people who had been barely schooled. But because of Illich’s admiration the pesantren of Indonesia seemed to be yet another example of Asia providing an unexpected light, after the obfuscations of colonialism. And a young businessman of Jakarta, a supporter of Mr. Wahid’s, arranged for me to visit pesantren near the city of Yogyakarta. One of the pesantren was Mr. Wahid’s own; it had been established by his family.

  There had followed two harrowing days: looking for the correct places first of all, moving along crowded country roads between crowded school compounds: usually quiet and sedate at the entrance, but then all at once—even in the evening—as jumping and thick with competitive life as a packed trout pond at feeding time: mobs of jeering boys and young men, some of them relaxed, in sarongs alone, breaking off from domestic chores to follow me, some of the mob shouting, “Illich! Illich!”

  With that kind of distraction I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, and I am sure I missed a lot. But deschooling didn’t seem an inappropriate word for what I had seen. I didn’t see the value of young villagers assembling in camps to learn village crafts and skills which they were going to pick up anyway. And I was worried by the religious side: the very simple texts, the very large classes, the learning by heart, and the pretense of private study afterwards. In the crowded yards at night I saw boys sitting in the darkness before open books and pretending to read.

  It wasn’t the kind of place I would have liked to go to myself. I said this to the young Indonesian who had come out with me from Jakarta as my guide and interpreter. He was bright and educated and friendly, always a little bit on my side in all our adventures. Now he dropped all courtesies and became downright irritated. Other people, when they heard what I had said about the pesantren, also became irritated.

  At the end of the two days I met Mr. Wahid in his pesantren house. I wrote about our meeting, but it was strange that, until I re-read what I had written, I had no memory of the man or the occasion. It might have been the fatigue of the two days, or it might have been the shortness of our meeting: Mr. Wahid, busy as ever on pesantren business, was going to Jakarta that evening, and couldn’t give me much time. Or—and this is most likely—it might have been because of the very dim light in Mr. Wahid’s sitting room: it was a great strain to try to see him through the gloom, and I must have given up, been content with his voice, and remained without a picture.

  What he said explained much of what I felt about the pesantren. Before Islam they would have been Buddhist monasteries, supported by the people of the villages and in return reminding them of the eternal verities. In the early days of Islam here they would have remained spiritual places, Sufi centers. In the Dutch time they would have become Islamic schools. Later they would in addition have tried to become a more modern kind of school. Here, as elsewhere in Indonesia, where Islam was comparatively recent, the various layers of history could still be easily perceived. But—this was my idea, not Mr. Wahid’s—the pesantren ran all the separate ideas together and created the kind of mishmash I had seen.

  While we talked there had been some chanting going on outside: an Arabic class. Mr. Wahid and I went out at last to have a look. The chanting was coming from the verandah of a very small house at the bottom of the garden. The light was very dim; I could just make out the teacher and his class. The teacher was one of the most learned men in the neighborhood, Mr. Wahid said. The pesantren had built the little house for him; the villagers fed him; and he had, in addition, a stipend of five hundred rupiah a month, at that time about eighty cents. So, Islamic though he was, chanting without pause through his lesson in Arabic law, he was descended—as wise man and spiritual lightning-conductor, living off the bounty of the people he served—from the monks of the Buddhist monasteries.

  I was immensely excited by his eighty-cents-a-month stipend and, when Mr. Wahid called him and he came and stood humbly before us in the great gloom, very small and pious and hunched, with very thick lenses to his glasses, I couldn’t get rid of the idea of the eighty cents and wondered how it was given and at what intervals.

  Mr. Wahid praised him while he stood before us and said he was thirty and knew a lot of the Koran by heart. I said it was marvelous, knowing the Koran by heart. “Half,” Mr. Wahid said. “Half.” And, considering the hunched man before us who had little else to do, I said with some sternness that it wasn’t good enough. He, the eighty-cents man, rounded his shoulders a little more, piously accepting and converting into religious merit whatever rebuke we might have offered him. And I feel that he was ready to round his shoulders a little more and a little more until he might have looked like a man whose head grew beneath his shoulders.

  It was he rather than Mr. Wahid who survived in my memory of that evening.

  The Jakarta businessman who had sent me to the pesantren in 1979 was Adi Sasono. He had been a supporter of Mr. Wahid then. But now he had moved away from him, and was on the other side, with the Association of Muslim Intellectuals. He had a big job with the association, and had a big office, with every kind of modern corporate trapping, high up in a big block in central Jakarta.

  He wanted me to know, when I went to see him, that in spite of appearances he had remained loyal to his old ideas about village uplift; it was Mr. Wahid who had been left behind. Once the pesantren schools were all right; now they weren’t.

  In the last century, in the Dutch time, the pesantren gave village people a kind of self-respect, and the pesantren heads, who were called kiyai, were a kind of informal local leader who could give some protection to village people. Times had changed; in the modern world the old system didn’t answer. The pesantren was owned by its kiyai; headship or ownership rights were passed down from father to son; so that, whatever the virtues of some kiyai, there was always the danger of “elitism” or “religious feudalism.”

  Adi said, “This traditional method of mobilizing people cannot be maintained in the long run. We need a more accountable process and a national collective decision-making.” In 1979 he had joined the pesantren movement to promote modern education—to complement traditional religious teaching—and to promote rural development. He thought now that that job was being better done by the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, ICMI in its Indonesian acronym (pronounced “itch-me”). “We develop the people to be more independent in making their own decisions, especially concerning the challenge of big capital coming to the rural area. The kiyai—one man, and a man of privilege—cannot be the guarantee of the people’s life. So ICMI is more on the human resource development and the people’s economic development.”

  Adi had been moving towards it, and now at last it had come: Imaduddin’s missionary idea about the development and management of human resources.

  There had been nothing from Adi about deschooling and Ivan Illich—that was the modernity and academic line of yesterday. In Adi’s current analysis the huts and squawking yards of the pesantren were as rustic and limited as they might have appeared to an uncommitted visitor. And a whole new set of approved words or ideas—elitism, religious feudalism, accountability, collective decision-making, the mobilizing of people, and, of course, human resources—were used, figuratively, to beat poor old Mr. Wahid about the head.

  And to beat, too, but only in my own mind, the figure called up from memory: the small, hunched, white-capped and white-clad figure in the sight-baffling gloom of Mr. Wahid’s backyard or garden, the eighty-cents-a-month man (at present rates of exchange more like a twenty-five-cents man), called from his very dim verandah and his chanting class in Islamic law
to stand before us, and meekly with bowed head to accept my rebuke for knowing only half the Koran at the age of thirty, when he had so little to do, and the village had built his narrow little house for him and kept him in such food as met his modest needs: an unlikely successor, in half-converted Indonesia, of the early Islamic Sufis and, before them, the monks of Buddhist times.

  Islam and Europe had arrived here almost at the same time as competing imperialisms, and between them they had destroyed the long Buddhist-Hindu past. Islam had moved on here, to this part of Greater India, after its devastation of India proper, turning the religious-cultural light of the subcontinent, so far as this region was concerned, into the light of a dead star. Yet Europe had dominated so quickly here that Islam itself had begun to feel like a colonized culture. The family history that a cultivated and self-aware man like Mr. Wahid carried in his head—a history that true family memory took back only a century and a quarter—was at the same time a history of European colonialism and of the recovery of Islam.

  The first time we met on this trip Mr. Wahid talked, but only in a glancing way, of his family history. I was taken with what he said and I felt I wanted to hear more. I went to see him again.

  We met in the main offices of the NU. They were on the ground floor of a simple, old-fashioned building on a main road, with a cleared yard at the front for cars. The rooms—not at all like Adi Sasono’s—were like railway waiting rooms, full of that kind of heavy, dark furniture, and with that kind of tarnish.

  I wanted to sit on a high, straight-backed chair so that I could write. All the chairs in Mr. Wahid’s office were very low. An assistant said that in another room there were chairs that would serve, but people were there, talking. Mr. Wahid, like a man who had suffered for too long from these talkers, said they were to be chased away. And they were chased away with such suddenness that coils of warm, undissipated cigarette smoke still hung just above the middle air when we went into the room. The cigarettes were Indonesian clove cigarettes. The smoke was heavy with clove oil, and there had been so much of it in that room, that after my afternoon there with Mr. Wahid, the clove smell remained on my hands and hair for days, resisting baths, like an anesthetic after an operation; and it never left my jacket all the time I was in Indonesia.

  Nothing had remained in my memory of Mr. Wahid from 1979. And I was surprised now to find that he was only fifty-one or fifty-two; so that in 1979, when he was already famous and of great authority, he would not have been forty. He was a short, plump man, perhaps about five feet three or four inches. As everyone said, his eyes were not good, but his physique and general appearance suggested someone with other problems as well, cardiac or respiratory. He was casually dressed, with an open-necked shirt. He would not have stood out in an Indonesian crowd. As soon as he began to speak, however—and his English was fluent and good and sensitive—his quality was apparent. He was a man to whom confidence and graces had been passed down over a couple of generations.

  Mr. Wahid said: “My grandfather was born in 1869, in East Java, in a sugar plantation area called Jombang. He came of a peasant family who followed a tradition of Sufism. The Sufis in Java had been running pesantren for centuries. My ancestors had their pesantren for two centuries, for six or seven generations before my grandfather.

  “My great-grandfather came from Central Java. He studied at a pesantren in Jombang, and was taken as a son-in-law by his teacher. This would have been in 1830, at the beginning of sugar planting in the area. That period was also the beginning of steamship travel via the Middle East. This was important for the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. It became easier. It also led to the emergence of rich new Muslim families growing cash crops. This new rich class could send their children to study in Mecca by the steamship lines. It was a coincidence, but history is often shaped by unconnected developments.

  “My great-grandfather was able to send my grandfather to Mecca in the last quarter of the last century. My grandfather went to Mecca perhaps in 1890, when he was twenty-one years old. He stayed there maybe five or six years. Because of the steamship lines you could send money to students. He came back and established his own pesantren. This was in 1898.

  “The story is that he established that with ten students only. At that time the establishing of a prayer house was considered as a challenge to prevailing values. In the vicinity of the sugar plantations there was an absence of religious life. The sugar factory made people depend on it by providing easy money to gamble, for drinking, for prostitution, all kinds of things frowned on by Islam. In the night in the first few months these ten students had to sleep in the middle of the prayer house. The walls of the prayer house were made of bamboo mats, and spears and all kinds of sharp weapons were thrust in from outside.

  “Maybe my grandfather was too strong in his criticism of people. He chose the sugarcane area quite deliberately. Maybe he had done this with some spiritual insight into the future. The clear wish was there to transform the whole community there, to make them follow the Islamic way of life. In 1947, at the end of his life, my grandfather had a pesantren of four thousand students and twenty acres of land. In the beginning he only had four acres. The community now is totally transformed. There is still a sugar mill there, but the whole community has left that old way of life and now follows an Islamic way of life.

  “My grandfather had married many times. He married also before he left for Mecca. All his marriages ended in divorce or death of wives. Maybe at the beginning of this century he got this new wife from the nobility. The nobility here means from the line of the kings of Java, ruling in Solo. We share the same family line with the wife of President Suharto. The nobility was already a little bit secularized, Westernized. This new wife of my grandfather’s was so proud of her noble origin she often said, according to my mother, ‘I want my children to have a different education. I don’t want them to follow the peasant way of life of my husband.’

  “Because of that she oriented my father and his younger brothers—eleven of them. They were given tutors from outside the area who taught things unknown in the pesantren—mathematics and Dutch language, general knowledge. My father even went through a course in typing. People wondered about that, because the Muslim community here still used the Arabic script for the local language. Later, when he went into public life, my father would sit in the backseat of the car and type as he was driven about. At the same time as he did those modern subjects my father had to study in the pesantren under his father and his brothers-in-law. And my grandmother invited a sheikh from al-Azhar in Cairo to come and educate my father and his younger brothers for seven years. That was unknown in Java. The Kurds provided very traditional education in Islam. The Egyptians through al-Afghani reformed the whole tradition of religious education in al-Azhar. So my father got the benefits of the two types of education. He was educated like a member of a royal family. That was why my father spoke flawless Arabic and knew Arabic literature very much. He subscribed to the famous periodicals of the Middle East.”

  Mr. Wahid’s father also went to Mecca. He went in 1931, when he was fifteen, and he stayed for two years. It was when he came back—his formal education now complete, though Mr. Wahid didn’t make the point—that he began to add to the curriculum of his pesantren, to make it a little more like the mixed curriculum he had himself gone through. He added geography and modern history. He also added, Mr. Wahid said, the idea of the school: this meant that students were “drilled” by the teacher.

  “Before, there was nothing like that. It was very polite. No questions. Everybody just listened to the teacher. With the introduction of the school system in the pesantren my father set up a series of incremental changes. There had been changes before of smaller scope but with no less impact. In 1923 my maternal grandfather instituted a new pesantren for girls. Now it’s so common everywhere.”

  The pesantren were essentially religious boardinghouses. By their nature they could not rise much above the level of the people. The improvements Mr. Wa
hid talked about seemed small: typing, geography, modern history. But perhaps they were not small at the time. Perhaps, as Mr. Wahid said, their effect was incremental.

  I asked him about the traditional side of pesantren teaching. He told me of his experiences of the late 1940s, many years after his father’s reforms.

  “When I was eight years old, after I completed the reading of the Koran, I was told to memorize this grammar book, Al Ajrumiyah. It was about fifteen pages. Every morning I was asked by my teacher to memorize a line or two. I was drilled in that. Later in the evening I had to take this book. A very basic text of religious laws: how to have ablution, how to do the right prayers.”

  This was the very thing I had seen in 1979—thirty years later—in the late evening in the pesantren: boys sitting about bamboozling themselves with a simple textbook of religious laws which they would have known by heart, with some boys even sitting in the dark before open books and pretending to read.

  Perhaps religious teaching had to come with this repetitiveness, this isolating and beating down and stunning of the mind, this kind of pain. Perhaps out of this there came self-respect of a sort, and even an idea of learning which—in the general cultural depression—might never have otherwise existed. Because out of this religious education, whatever its sham scholarship and piety, and its real pain, there also came a political awakening.

  This was the other side of Mr. Wahid’s family story. It was interwoven with the other story of pesantren success and reform.

  “In 1908 a local organization was established in Solo called Sarekat Dagung Islam by a trader who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Four years later that organization was transformed into a national organization called Sarekat Islam. It was not confined to trade.

  “My grandfather had a cousin ten years younger, Wahab Hasbullah. Wahab had been sent to my grandfather to be educated. Wahab went to Mecca afterwards and took a friend, Bisri. After four years in Mecca they heard about Sarekat Islam. Wahab asked to open a Mecca branch of Sarekat. This was in 1913, the year after Sarekat Islam was founded. Bisri didn’t go along because he didn’t have the permission of my grandfather, who was also his teacher. Bisri became my maternal grandfather. Wahab was my great maternal uncle. When he returned from Mecca, in 1917, he went to Surabaya. In 1919 Sarekat Islam split. A Dutchman influenced two Sarekat Islam members to form the Red Sarekat Islam. In 1924 there was a Saudi congress for the new caliphate for the Muslims. Wahab joined the Surabaya committee.”